Losing it

Steve Hayward, showing his characteristic good judgment, posted Lena Dunham’s “First Time” ad for President Obama without comment. The ad spoke for itself. All that we, as males well outside the target audience, could do was present the evidence and shake our heads.

However, Emily Esfahani Smith at Ricochet falls well within the demographic group to which Dunham hopes to appeal. Moreover, she has praised Dunham’s hit show, “Girls,” for its critique of the standard feminist script about casual sex. She found that “with its painfully awkward and unerotic sex scenes, the Emmy-nominated show revealed just how grim and degrading sex in the era of post-feminism has become, especially for women.” Specifically, “the show’s message that casual sex leads to the objectification of women stood in direct contrast to the standard pop culture trope — found in shows like “Sex and the City,” magazines like Cosmopolitan, and movies like “No Strings Attached” — that sex with no strings attached empowers girls.”

Call me crazy, but when I think “first sexual experience,” I don’t think “big government” (even if both do have a tendency to promise more than they deliver). If Miss Dunham imagines her first vote was like good sex, then she has bigger problems than political naivete. . . .

To Miss Dunham 2.0, women really are just sexual objects, after all. They make important decisions, like voting for president, by consulting what goes on between their legs rather than by what goes on between their ears. As she advises in the ad, “You want to do it with a guy who cares whether you get health insurance and specifically whether you get birth control.”

Translation: The kind of guy you should have sex with (or vote for) is someone whose primary concern is not with who you are, what you want, or what you think, but with you not getting pregnant with his kid. To me, this guy sounds like a jerk. To Miss Dunham, this guy sounds like Barack Obama. This must be a joke right? “The video may be light, but the message is serious,” Miss Dunham tweeted last week. . . .

[The view that] that women are ruled by their sexual selves. . .is precisely the premise that Miss Dunham’s ad, universally praised on the left, relies upon. It assumes that women are single-mindedly obsessed with having cheap sex (not to mention paranoid enough to think that the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan ticket has a secret plan to outlaw it).

The ad’s patronizing message is directed at young, unmarried women who consider themselves cosmopolitan, career-oriented feminists. These are intelligent women, women who should know better than to be manipulated by the Obama campaign’s desperate attempt to buy their votes. The ad does not mention the economy, foreign relations, education, energy or other important policy issues. How blinkered and frivolous does the Obama campaign think women are?

I know nothing of Lena Dunham or her show. Perhaps the pro-Obama ad, not her television show, reflects her true attitude about sexual relations and women. Perhaps she is hopelessly confused. But it may be the case that Dunham has put her true attitude on core issues of sexual relations and women aside in order to best serve the larager cause of leftism.

This wouldn’t be a first. Communist Party members did it for decades. American Jews do it today. Now, it may be the turn of American youth. No wonder there’s an enthusiasm gap.